I admit, I have been falling behind in my worklog. Well, more accurately, t's the work itself I've been falling behind on. It seems like I am awaiting one or two niggly, out-of-stock parts from every build. Plus, I've been a bit too busy to really make much progress I'm afraid. Time should be less of a premium (I hope) over the next few weeks, so perhaps I'll make some more progress.

But by now, I'm sure many of the folding enthusiasts among you have heard this news. Specifically...

Big Advanced (BA) is an experimental type of Folding@home WUs intended for the most powerful machines in FAH. However, as time goes on, technology advances, and the characteristics associated with the most powerful machines changes. Due to these advances in hardware capabilities, we will need to periodically change the BA minimum requirements. Thus, we are shortening the deadlines of the BA projects. As a result, assignments will have a 16 core minimum. To give donors some advance warning, we are announcing this now, but the change will take place in 2 months: no earlier than on Monday January 16, 2012.

We understand that any changes to how FAH works is a disruption for donors, and we have been trying to minimize such changes. For that reason, we are not changing the points system at this time.

However, we want to emphasize that the BA program is experimental and that donors should expect changes in the future, potentially without a lot of notice (although we will try our best to give as much notice as we can). In particular, as hardware evolves, it is expected that we will need to change the nature of the BA WUs again in the future.

So with this in mind I will be reconsidering some of the components of the farm. I will provide more details once I have made some decisions.